Digital television is coming to hand-held mobile terminals, such as mobile phones. Currently an antenna designed to receive digital video broadcasting is conforming to DVB-H specification, which was developed in 2004 for accessing DVB services on hand-held devices. According to the DVB-H specification, data transmission is carried out in a time-slicing manner such that bursts of data are received at a time. As such, the receiver is allowed to be inactive for much of the time in order to save power. There are two frequency bands designated for DVB services: VHF band of 174-230 MHz and UHF band of 470-838 MHz. While it is desirable and advantageous to have an internal compact and unobtrusive DVB-H antenna for mobile terminals, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to use a simple antenna that is small enough to fit inside current mobile phones even in the frequency range of 470-838 MHz.
One solution is to use a frequency-tunable narrow-band antenna. However, such an antenna is complicated to design and manufacture. Furthermore, non-linear switching and tuning components associated with the antenna are potential sources of interference problems in the mobile terminal because they are placed near the sources of high power cellular transmit antennas.
Owing to its relatively low operation frequency band, a digital television antenna has to be relatively large to function properly. An internal DVB-H antenna can increase the total volume occupied by all antennas inside a mobile terminal significantly. It is desirable and advantageous to develop new solutions to keep the total antenna volume small enough to permit terminal sizes that are still appealing to consumers.